Various enterprises with expansive computing networks seek to have their client computers managed from a central location by an administrator or the like. These administration activities include, by way of example, distributing applications to the client computer systems, maintaining the client computer systems and upgrading and/or removing client applications from the central location. For this reason, different forms of management software are used to deliver and monitor application software and other services remotely from a server to the one or more client computers.
Asset management software is often used to protect software used in an organization and for conducting other software management tasks. This may include various forms of software acquisition and/or software inventory, installation of applications on the client computer systems within an organization, application of various policies to the installed base, and defining consequences for violations of the policies. One type of asset management software is Microsoft® Systems Management Server (“SMS”) software. When installed, the SMS software creates several Windows Management Instrumentation (“WMI”) namespaces to manage various sites within the organization. The client computers also require management software to be installed on the client machine.
Attempts to automate monitoring the health of client systems deployed on the network still require a degree of manual intervention and troubleshooting at the client computing system in order to remedy many encountered problems. For example, current SMS health services only provide a very high-level description of problems with client systems. That is, they now merely indicate whether the client system health is generally good or bad. They fail, however, to inform a system administrator as to the precise nature of the health problem or how it should be corrected.